Morgan the hard-working farm girl and Morgan the gleefully-wicked warlock. Amazing what a few years
Morgan the hard-working farm girl and Morgan the gleefully-wicked warlock. Amazing what a few years and being consumed alive by an ancient evil spellbook can do to a person. Few who know rambunctious shapeshifter Master Daubenmire are aware that prior to the accident which reanimated him with god-like control over his form, Morgan was a girl. A rando country girl in her teens, dividing time not spent working the family farm between entertaining her army of younger siblings with fairytales and disappearing up trees with her banjo. Morgan Foust enjoyed her life. Always one to work hard and play hard and loved her sisters and brothers. But the valley of Honeywell, while charming and beautiful and sleepy, can be a challenging place to grow up. It’s a place of tradition, your role largely predetermined at birth. The blacksmith’s son will replace him. The eldest son gets the farm. Everyone attends the single church, the single school.And nobody leaves. Except Morgan’s uncle, who, they say, has seen even the other side of the sea. He took no wife, had no family, and would come and go with the seasons, watched with reservation on his returns as he lugged along his sea chest loaded with god knows what morally-questionable foreign paraphernalia. Little Morgan was his shadow when he was in town, begging stories and exotic trinkets off him. He inadvertently introduced thorns into her soul, a travel-lust destined to be denied. Conventional wisdom said a woman wasn’t safe helping drive livestock to the distant port let alone travel. Did she have a deathwish? Do you have any idea what they will do to you alone? No, the world was too dangerous. Her place was at home. There were mouths to feed. The farm needed all hands. Honeywellers don’t leave. So, abruptly and violently acquiring what Morgan touts as ‘perfect liquidity of form’ was at once dream come true and waking nightmare. Cruelly, Morgan’s fantasy of leaving the valley suddenly wasn’t just a very real possibility… it was her only option. Black magic is punishable by death in Honeywell. –At first, Morgan was horrified. Clumsy with her new ability, struggling to hold any form without melting grotesquely between shapes, Morgan hid in her uncle’s empty house for nearly a week, stealing supplies at night and forming a panicked plan to find him, the only person she knew who might not freak out at her accidental bumble into the evil occult. For days straight she lived in front of his dressing mirror, practically vibrating in total horror and pure love with the limitless march of faces and creatures in the glass. Claws, wings, large and small, birds and bats and made up beasts of pure imagination. Men, women, old and young, herself, her siblings, in clothing from roughspun to filigreed silk. What was she not capable of? Outside the walls, this sudden arrival of some dodgy stranger claiming to be 'house sitting,’ the eerie break-ins at night, and the disturbing disappearance of Foust’s daughter had put the village on high alert. Morgan was caught breaking her house-sitter disguise one night, and the men, led by the priest and her own father, attacked the house to drive out the demon now believed to have kidnapped or killed Morgan. In the torchlight, the hatred and fear on her father’s face, her brothers, and all the neighbors who made up her world, destroyed her. She lost shape immediately, melting into a formless wide-eyed half beast in her terror, guilt, and grief. She barely escaped, snatching her pack as she hurled herself out the second story window, bursting into dragon form and screwing up her first flap, the great Morgan Daubenmire debuting into the world with a faceplant as rocks and arrows wizzed by. The abomination rolled into a run, failing several times to jump into flight before the wind lifted it away into the cold, empty night. Evidence of Morgan was found in the house, but never her body. Her family mourned her deeply. Over the next days, an unknown number of kids were paddled and marriages threatened as people across the countryside reported a winged monster passing overhead towards the sea.—Morgan has the drawling, lilting, prowling, oily accent of a cat-stroking British tv villain. This is entirely an affectation he started doing for his ‘Daubenmire’ act during his downswing into villainy that became habit. Morgan’s natural accent is rural American, discernible when he’s emotional and betrayed by the odd choice of word or cuss. (Tarnation! Dagnabbit! Shucks!) He drops the Daubenmire act entirely around his brother Tobin, who cannot take him seriously otherwise. (Magda feels the exact opposite.)Other remnants of the warlock’s surprise upbringing become obvious once you know. His fiery disdain for kings, nobility, and politicians. Tendency to drop a “y’all.” His bizarrely out-of-place knowledge of cookery and household chores and tendency to just start doing them at friends’ houses. His talent with banjo and fiddle. And of course his natural way with children, who invariably think his one-man zoo is the best thing on the planet. Until he’s reunited with Tobin, Morgan rarely takes his birth form. It carries the crushing weight of leaving her family thinking she’s dead, and the horrifying specter of possibly returning home… and having to explain the big bad infamous murderous anarchist she’s become. If you catch Morgan in her birth form, she’s in a very strange and dangerous mood indeed.—Morgan is as literally gender fluid as it gets. Constant shapeshifting has washed away any concept of physical identity. Male, female, old, young… Morgan doesn’t even identify as HUMAN anymore let alone any subflavor of it. That said, one does need at least a few shapes ones human friends can recognize one in. Morgan’s ugly old warlock form is his ‘default’ human shape, the one in which the average person would know him. And fear and hate him. (So a few years after his reformation into a decent being he invents a new look, one that’s suspiciously smack between his birth and warlock forms.)The only time Morgan cares about pronouns is when one of his friends effs up and uses the wrong thing for the body he’s in and blows his cover. Otherwise doesn’t matter to him in the slightest. I default to male for him because that’s how he’s known to people in his story for the bulk of it, unless she’s female at the moment or I’m talking about her pre-shapeshifter days. Join us, it’s fun! -- source link
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